Research Abstracts Online
January
2008 - March 2009

University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

PI: Bruce F. Wollenberg

Solving the Unit Commitment Problem by Mixed Integer Programming

Unit commitment (UC), in general, is the problem of deciding when and which generating units at each power station should start up and shut down. The goal of this project was to find a practical approach for solving the UC problem by mixed integer programming. Since UC is a large-scale combinatorial, constrained, optimization problem, reaching the optimal operating point is very difficult using traditional methods such as dynamic programming.